A Letter from Poland:
The Same Europe, the Other Hate?

Tomek Kitlinski & Pawel Leszkowicz

“We’ll do to you what Hitler did to Jews!” shout counterdemonstrators at feminist and gay marchers in Poland. This country abjects Jews, women, and homosexuals. In the old Polish capital of Cracow caustic acid was thrown at the Parade of Equality which champions the rights of queers on May 7, 2004 a week after Poland joined the European Union. In Riga, Latvia, bags of excrement were pelted at gay priders on July 22, 2006.

Our gay love, our subjectivity is soiled, hurt, humiliated. Affective alterity appears as peril for the nation. Citizens or rather nationalists are to be bred in the name of the nation (the Latin natio for breeding). Same-sex love and the freedom of women is a crime to the newly-born and ever-breeding nations of Eastern Europe. Abortion has been criminalized in Poland since 1993.

A spectre is haunting Eastern Europe: the spectre of love dissidence. Women and gays stand up against the exclusionary body politic. Artists, in particular women, and young activists are the new dissidents. This dissent in society is being created in their work, exhibition projects and, generally, the mobilizations of minorities as revolt. Here belongs the younger generation’s insistence on combining queerness and Jewishness. Art and activism explore democratic diversity to counter nationalist censorship, misogyny, homophobia – an inhospitality, that is, xenophobia in the society.

Members of the League of Polish Families, a party that until recnetly was part of the government coalition, physically attacked one young woman artist, Dorota Nieznalska, and then the party brought charges against her for “offending religious feelings.” She was sentenced to “restriction of freedom in the form of penal labour” and banned from leaving the country. Nieznalska and her feminist and queer allies participated in the “Love and Democracy” exhibition in Poznan and Gdansk. Presented at the show was Dorota Nieznalska’s photography presenting fundamentalism-cum-nationalism in terms of sadomasochism. In her work both the erotic and the political dimension of sadomasochism are prominent. Her photos entice the viewer with their perverse allure and at the same time they sketch a perverse commentary on the subject of the surrounding social reality. Nieznalska’s images reveal the sexual foundation of the society dreamed about by fundamentalists. Dorota Nieznalska represents new dissidence against the anti-modernism of today’s Poland. Against violent, claustrophobic, repressive religionism – without religion as inner experience.

Pawel curated the show and in his installations Tomek analyzed the Jewish and gay ideas-images of hospitality as non-majoritarian praxis. Minorities ally also in a practical way: Warsaw’s reform synagogue Beit issued a statement supporting the Gay Parade, as chairwoman of the liberal Jewish community Dorota Szymborska-Dyrda put it, “minority for minority.”

Even if the regime changes, other domineering parties in Poland also draw on prejudices. During their rule, the ex-Communists did nothing to promote the rights of women and gays. The Civic Platform, a liberal, market-oriented party is a mixture of homophiles and homophobes. The worst in its hate is the far-right party until recently in government coalition, the League of Polish Families, with its roots in Poland’s inter-war anti-Semitism. It is led by Roman Giertych, until last month Poland’s Minister of Education. His grandfather, Jedrzej Giertych, was a racist politician in the 1930s and author of Towards Ending the Crisis (1938), a book where he called for the expulsion of Jews from Poland. Journalist Andrew Nagorski of Newsweek comments on Giertych’s party: “gay bashing has been his party latest sport”. The League’s militia, the All-Polish Youth violently attacks gay prides – with stones, bottles, and such catcalls as “To the gas!”

The All-Polish Youth has a long history of anti-Semitism and remains proud of having supported the numerus clausus and bench ghettoes at Poland’s universities between the world wars. Roman Giertych reactivated the All-Polish Youth and led a “Parade of Normality” in Warsaw, one that presented skinheads as model Poles. The League’s anti-gay tirades are repeated over and over again by the media. Gays are disrespected in parliament (the League’s MPs use there words like “deviants,” or “pederasts”), on the streets, in the media and even publications of scholarly ambitions. The Encyclopedia, published in 2005 by Poland’s leading newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza and the Polish Scientific Publishers last year, defines homosexuality as a form of “disturbed sexual identification.”

Reporter Jean-Luc Testault of the Agence France Press noted: “In this part of Europe homophobia is not confined to the circles of Christian fundamentalists.” Atheist Boguslaw Wolniewicz, Professor of Philosophy at Warsaw University, said on national TV that the Jewish holiday of Sukkot must not be publicly celebrated in Poland; likewise, gays must not go public. Wolniewicz’s anti-German lampoon attacking Benedict XVI was published by the mass audience Radio Maryja’s newspaper Nasz Dziennik (The German Pope admonished Radio Maryja). Professor of Philosophy and current Minister of Education, Ryszard Legutko, authored a book entitled “I Don’t Like Toleration” and an article in the broadsheet Rzeczpospolita about queer movement and studies as “invented party of the wronged” and “dangerous absurd.” Zdzislaw Krasnodebski, Polish sociologist at Bremen University, is active in the Polish press deriding German help for the gay movement in Poland. Neither Legutko’s nor Krasnodebski’s homophobia is inspired by Catholicism. Theirs is a rationalized hate in gentlemen cultivating their petty pet aversions. “Today lesbo-gays, tomorrow zoophiliacs, who the day after tomorrow??? Is that how freedom and democracy should look like??? This is syphilization!!!” is a slogan not of the All-Polish Youth, but of the ruling Law and Justice party.

But more and more of Poland’s scholars, students, and even pupils turn into anti-government activists. Commentator Jan Puhl of Der Spiegel writes: “And so in the meantime a little Polish gay movement changes peu à peu into a citizens’ initiative against intolerance”. Women public intellectuals Maria Janion, Magdalena Sroda, Kazimiera Szczuka, spearhead it. Janion (b. 1926) has changed the Polish humanities, edited an influential series of anthologies Transgressions and published a dozen of her own books. The recent ones analyze misogyny and anti-Semitism in Poland. Janion and her seminarists, including feminist literary historian, author of a book Cinderella, Frankenstein and Other Women and TV host Kazimiera Szczuka, political philosopher Magdalena Sroda are a voice of freedom in contemporary Poland. Alongside them, Krytyka Polityczna is a journal, publishing house and milieu of progressiste younger sociologists, literary critics and activists. They publish a number of translations of Zizek and Badiou. To their recent issue, they added a CD documenting Slavoj Zizek’s visit to their headquarters. “Father Zizek”, said Krytyka’s editor-in-chief smirking, “the public is yours.”

Krytyka Polityczna’s Igor Stokfiszewski blasts Polish poetry for conservatism. In his literary criticism sheet europa. poetical fiction Igor Stokfiszewski went far in going beyond conventions: he abandoned punctuation. A Gertrude Stein-like nonconformity began in contemporary Poland in an artzine Counterart-Kontrsztuka which aimed to avant-gardize poetics and politics alike. Stokfiszewski champions new gay fiction in Poland – with many predecessors of discreet homotextuality in the literary canon – a cult novel of Michal Witkowski. The younger generation of Polish Jews initiated a cultural magazine Gwiazdeczki/Babel. It warns against the anti-Semitism and homophobia in Poland (texts by Darek Galecki, Dorota Szymborska-Dyrda, and Pawel Pilarski), presents feminist and queer ideas (articles by Ewa Majewska) and goes back to the transgressive figure of a woman tzaddik (drama by Anna Cialowicz). Textually, but also visually with its atwork by dissident artists, Gwiazdeczki/Babel embody the spirit of revolt.

Homophobia and anti-Semitism are resonated by Radio Maryja, the fundamentalist media conglomerate. It has no sacred, no sublimation, no aura. In opposition to this “Radio of Mary” and Poland’s homogeneous Marian cult, a diversity of Mary’s identities, their “strangeness” could be cultivated: Mary is an impoverished Jewish woman Miriam, Maryam in the Koran, explosion of subjectivity in Kristevan feminism. Pawel presented postmodern Madonnas of dissident artists in a GK Collection exhibition in Poznan. It placed Polish art in a cosmopolitan context and punctuated sadomasochism (Dorota Nieznalska again) with the tenderness of the Virgin. Open ideas of religion, and not of fundamentalism, as the divine as Levinasian autre qu’autrui, of generosity and hospitality to others are badly needed here. We need the biblically-inspired “Love the stranger!” and the secular public sphere. Elements of Bergsonian dynamic religion and a strong civil society – laïque. Instead we are crushed under the local pieties of xenophobia in post-Protestant Latvia, post-Soviet Russia and ultranationalist rather than Catholic Poland.

We are in the grip of far-righters who are not extremists any more, but the mightiest part of the political mainstream. They see themselves as the epitome of “normality,” guardians of the temple of civilization. They construct a state of siege, feel their ideas threatened, and entrench themselves. Discrimination, to their mind, is not against national and sexual minorities, but against themselves. The reactionaries worldwide appropriate the language of minorities. Italian politician whose candidacy as EU commissioner was dropped because of his homophobia, Rocco Buttiglione, calls Christians an endangered minority. He and other ultra-rightists use the arguments of human rights, freedom of expression, tolerance. Under these banners, the international mobilization of the right involves Poland, in fact culminates here. Rocco Buttiglione was feted in Poland; his heterosexist lecture at the Catholic University of Lublin was interrupted with bursts of enthusiastic applause.

The far-righters enact a dark family romance. Their parties are incestuous clans: the Kaczynskis, the Giertychs. The cult of women and children is a smoke screen for despising them. It is scorn that is directed to the non-males, including in the fantasies of far-righers, gays. If women, children and gays do not change into virile, in fact military “real Polish” men, they are to be sacrificed. Tribe chieftains of the Kaczynskis’ and the Giertychs’ parties and now government turn Poland into a jail of chauvinist-fundamentalist mentality, Milosz’s “captive mind” of a closed community.

“Poland for Poles” is de rigeur. On September 16, 2007 in his convention speech PM Jaroslaw Kaczynski said that his party must win the elections to make sure that “this soil is inhabited by one Polish nation, and not a variety of nations.”

This is our reading, hidden in a series of East European narratives: in the beginning was xenophobia. Openness to strangers, philoxenia, is a work of culture. Eastern Europe today is hostage to hate and abjection and exclusion; we witness, nay, we participate in a ghostly return of anti-Semitism, misogyny and homophobia. At stake is one’s disgust, abomination and violence against the not-belonging, against oneself.

Poland lacks hospitality, philoxenia. Hospitality is a Biblical, Koranic, Kantian, Arendtian, Derridean, Baumanian idea which we badly need here and now. It was Zygmunt Bauman who called for hospitality at this year’s Festival of Europe. In Polish, the very word for hospitality, goscinnosc, embraces innosc, otherness. Hosting otherness, including the Kristevan (or just human!) strangeness in oneself, is crucial in our part of Europe. And globally.